Think yourself a better picture

Want to enjoy the benefits of a super-sharp high-definition screen without buying a new TV? Simply tell yourself that you are watching HD and put up a few posters to transform your experience.

That’s one implication of a Dutch study into how people’s expectations affect their television viewing experience.

Sixty people in turn were shown the same video clip on the same television. Half were told to expect clearer, sharper pictures thanks to HD technology&colon; an impression backed up by posters, flyers and the presence of an extra-thick cable connected to the screen. The other half were told to expect a normal DVD image.

See the difference

Questionnaires revealed that the people who had been led to expect HD reported seeing higher-quality images. “Participants were unable to discriminate properly between digital and high-definition signals,” says Lidwien van de Wijngaert at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, who carried out the study with colleagues from Utrecht University.

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The goal of the study was to test how “framing” – what people are led to expect about HD – influences their experience of it. “If we want to understand the diffusion of new innovations we have to understand how they are framed,” van de Wijngaert told New Scientist, “and so far the diffusion of HD has been relatively slow.”

That is despite the fact that there are clear technical differences between standard-definition and high-definition viewing. As well as the costs of upgrading, van de Wijngaert, thinks that the framing effect is affecting consumer behaviour.

The framing experiment may not replicate the experience of going into a TV store&colon; there, it is usually easy to see that an HD picture is better because HD TV sets are side by side with conventional ones, says van de Wijngaert.

But situations more like the experimental one do influence the spread of HD because people are not always able to make such a direct comparison. For example, they may judge HD after seeing it at someone else’s house, or after paying for an upgrade to their own TV service. In those examples, framing can have a significant effect.

This had better be worth it

“We had expected that the difference wouldn’t be perceived very well, but hadn’t expected the framing effect to be so strong,” van de Wijngaert says. The effect may be magnified once a person has paid out for an HD subscription, set-top box or television, she adds. “I think people are very inclined to justify the investment they have made; it’s a normal psychological thing to do.”

The results of the experiment might have been different had it taken place in North America, though, where conventional television uses the NTSC instead of the PAL technical standard. Picture quality is lower with NTSC, “so the difference compared with HD is much larger than for Europeans”, says van de Wijngaert.